1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an annealing process. More particularly, the present invention relates to a multi-step annealing process.
2. Description of Related Art
When the integration for semiconductor device in integrated circuit is getting larger and larger, it is also requited to have super-thin gate dielectric layer with high dielectric constant and low leakage current. When the size of a metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistor is less than 100 nm, the dielectric constant usually needs to be greater than 7. The material with higher dielectric constant can improve isolation effect. However, the gate dielectric layer in MOS transistor is formed by silicon oxide, and the dielectric constant for the silicon oxide is about 3.9. The silicon oxide is therefore not suitable for use as the dielectric layer in the MOS device with more and more reduced size. The conventional technology usually uses the nitridation process to dope the dielectric layer of silicon oxide, so as to increase the dielectric constant.
The usual nitridation process includes thermal nitridation process and the plasma nitridation process. The Thermal nitridation process uses the rapid thermal nitridation to dope the nitrogen atoms into the dielectric layer. However, after the thermal nitridation process, the nitrogen dopants are not uniformly distributed in the dielectric layer.
Another nitridation process is the plasma nitridation process. The plasma nitridation process uses the method of ion bombardment to dope the nitrogen atoms into the dielectric layer. However, the plasma nitridation process would cause the nitrogen dopants to be not uniformly distributed in the dielectric layer, and further destroy the surface of the dielectric layer, resulting in the occurrence of direct-tunneling current.
Furthermore, as for the high voltage device in the dual gate device, the threshold voltage distribution is worse caused by uneven the dopant distribution in the channel region. Accordingly, the performance of the high voltage device is seriously affected.